For a year, Decoratelier Jozef Wouters worked with Open Arts House Globe Aroma on Underneath Which Rivers Flow. A group of women and men – builders, poets and dreamers – met weekly in the Decoratelier in Molenbeek. Together, they built stories, a secret garden full of wormholes to unsuspected worlds.

A small society of well-meaning intellectuals choose a dead-ordinary man, to inspire, manipulate and guide through the political landscape. Step one is to expand democracy. Step two is to lay the resentment and identity fetishism to rest. Like a golem emerging from the silt of Europe’s magical subconscious, the decoy crawls forth.

In this theatre monologue, Bruno Vanden Broecke plays one of the most legendary philosophers in history. A few hours before his death, he reflects on his life and thought. This production demonstrates that 2400 years later, Socrates’ contributions to philosophy are still as relevant as ever.

Landscape Orchestra seeks a musical answer to the question of how we can depict departure, travel, and arrival. The production visits the landscapes that we traverse on our way to different and better places. A series of portraits shows people for whom the world is difficult but not necessarily less poetic.

An apparently endless chain of murders and blood feuds: this is the plot of the Oresteia. In Orestes in Mosul, Milo Rau combines the tragedy of tragedies with contemporary political conflicts. How will the chain of violence between the parties in the Syrian-Iraqi civil war and their international allies ever come to an end? With an ensemble of Iraqi and European actors, Rau presents an Oresteia for our time.

Under the title Hyperpresent, five contemporary thinkers will give a talk on a new idea that they introduced themselves. Afterwards, they will engage in a conversation with philosopher Laurent De Sutter – who curated this series. American architect, urbanist, writer, and professor at Yale University Keller Easterling will talk this evening about the Extrastatecraft.

Damiaan De Schrijver, Bert Haelvoet and Matthias de Koning are moving into the medium of film. Where do film and theatre coalesce? Where do they clash and where do they enhance one another? Their exploration of these questions is based on a variety of source material, such as the interviews that Alfred Hitchcock gave to the likes of François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard.

In 1809, Goethe wrote DieWahlverwandtschaften. He places four characters on a country estate, and observes their reactions. De KOE and Lineke Rijxman have now written a new Wahlverwandtschaften. How will the two couples fare, now that we can no longer blame nature for our whims and desires? Will it be as catastrophic? Or even more catastrophic?

It is the most sensational event of the past year: the massive protest of young people against the climate impasse. This Generation Hope holds up a mirror to politicians and has catapulted the climate crisis to the centre of our social debate. Ecopolis 2019 is a special edition for but especially with #GenerationHope, on the theme of a sustainable future on a liveable planet.

‘Money rules the world,’ it is sometimes said. Is money responsible for what has happened in the world under its governance? Can we call it to account for the horrifying situations in which many people find themselves today? Christophe Meierhans invites you to join him in an exploration of what money is and does. Last season, he premiered Trials of Money. He is now presenting a revised solo version.

In 1994, Jan Decorte wrote his inimitable theatre script Bloetwollefduivel: a jet-black abstraction of the ultimate play about evil: Shakespeare’s Macbeth. body a.k.a. starts from this iconic text but seeks to ward off evil and to turn the downwards spiral into an ecstatic high. Jan Decorte, Sigrid Vinks, Benny Claessens and Lisah Adeaga engage in the battle body and soul.

Johan Heldenbergh-as-Marx reflects on an eventful life and body of thought. Where did he make mistakes? And where has he been proved right? Can his philosophy still be relevant and liberating? In times of uncertainty and growing inequality, Marx aims to be a confrontational, critical, and impassioned plea for freedom and human dignity.

A man commits a terrorist attack in a museum of contemporary art, killing 49 children and a teacher. He waits on death row for seven years. A week before his execution, he convinces the police detective who was in charge of his case to join him for his last meal. What meaning do these two men hope to find in the death that they both desire, each in their own way?

Louis Janssens and Timo Sterckx used the book Europeana, a Brief History of the Twentieth Century by Patrik Ourednik to make a production about history, about graduating, about beginning. It might be a very long story.

All the Good is a story with a double autobiographical background: on the one hand, the life of Israeli elite soldier and war veteran Elik Niv, and on the other, Jan Lauwers’ life with Grace Ellen Barkey and their children – in a house and workspace in Molenbeek. It is love story in an age in which Europe is throwing its values to the wind and a growing group of people is being seduced by hate and intolerance.

A stone’s throw from the Kaaistudios, there is a row of dilapidated and unhealthy social housing blocks that will soon be demolished: these are the five blocks of the Rempart des Moines. The current residents have to make way for more affluent buyers. The Brussels Brecht-Eisler Choir is presenting a musical theatre piece that attempts to capture and evoke their confusion and uncertainty.

In MEMENTO MORI!, documentary filmmaker and visual artist Els Dietvorst brings two solos together. The first is performed by Dirk Roofthooft, one of Flanders’ most iconic actors, the second by the Brussels-based actress Aurelie Di Marino. The first monologue mirrors the second. As a diptych, they reflect on themes such as individualism, globalization and migration, as well as the alienation and disenchanted world to which they lead.

Under the title Hyperpresent, five contemporary thinkers will give a talk on a new idea that they introduced themselves. Afterwards, they will engage in a conversation with philosopher Laurent De Sutter – who curated this series. Boris Groys is an art critic, media theorist and philosopher. He is professor at New York University. His work is dedicated to the exploration of the link between socialism, modernism, contemporary art and media and technology.

The first talk shows aired in the 1950s and they have determined the evening rhythm in many living rooms ever since. But the invention of the internet has definitively pushed the format into decline. In TALK SHOW, Suze Milius bids them farewell. It is both a retrospective and a look ahead into the future, an attempt to ascribe value to everything that gradually disappears, and an ode to the details of our existence.

On a bare stage under bright light, six hapless clowns do their best to get along and pass the time. They fight and chase in eruptions of uneasy mayhem, then cool off a little, settle and wait for the whole thing to kick off again. Carefully unbalanced between funny and not funny, Out Of Order is the ruins of a show in the ruins of a world.

An expedition to the source of the Styx has taken Karen Røise Kielland and Katja Dreyer to the heart of Greek mythology. They breathe new life into an old myth through numerous encounters with local residents and their stories about the river. The performance begins with multiplicity and chaos, but the closer to the source, the more order and monochrome silence begin to surface.

This curated Beckett evening presents a surprising mix of forms: a monologue by Johan Leysen; an academic lecture about memory, neurology, machines and consciousness; a video installation with an immersive (post-)apocalyptic landscape; and a concert. Through this combination, Kris Verdonck explores a fascination that he shares with Beckett, namely technology and the increasing conflict between humans and machines.

In their search for Arabic literature, tg STAN sought and found allies at the Nomadic Arts Centre Moussem, and among the theatremakers of Kloppend Hert, the company led by Haider Al Timimi. Eight performers go in search of answers to questions that are essential to them, in a cross-border space where multiple influences can blend into one whole. But it begins at the beginning: an open forum and conversation.

In this personal performance, Khadija El Kharraz Alami blends perspectives from Euripides’ Medea with her own story about growing up between both the Western and the Moroccan world – and about the clash of forces within the self.